DualShockers Guide: How To Keep All of the Free PlayStation Plus Games Without Worrying About Storage

With Sony’s PlayStation Plus, it’s all about the instant game collection. Every month, good guy Sony (picture the meme here) goes out of its way to provide a handful of free games. In September alone the service will be giving away the entire Resident Evil Chronicles HD Collection. It’s slowly but surely becoming PlayStation’s own version of Netflix… but with video games at the helm of its modus operandi.

A realistic concern that some subscribers may have with all of the free goodies is running out of space. Most of the time players are assuming that once they delete something that is no longer part of the free game promo that it’s lost forever. And that is so wrong.

Not only can you re-download whenever you want (as long as you’re subscribing to PlayStation Plus of course), but you can actually make this work like being a real game collection without worrying about storage at all.

Unbeknownst to many, once you click download in the PlayStation Store, that particular item is then activated and tied to your PSN account, even if the item is available for a limited time… like a PlayStation Plus freebie.

For example, let’s say I want to dig into the Resident Evil Chronicles HD Collection, but I’m out of space this month because of all the other stuff I have on my hard drive or maybe I just want to add it to my backlog. All I would have to do is find it in the store and click download, once I prompted to continue downloading in the background, I can immediately cancel it.

I can then back out of the store completely, go to my PSN account information, and voilà: Resident Evil Chronicles HD Collection is there and ready to be downloaded when I’m ready to play it. No worrying about deleting other games, or deleting game content (I’m looking at you video games with 5GB worth of forced HDD file installation, you know who you are). Just like Netflix, it’s as though you’re adding games to your PlayStation queue so to speak.

Is this ideal? Probably not, especially if your broadband connection is capped or your data speeds aren’t that great since you’ll have to download entire games when you’re finally ready to play them. So while it’s definitely not the most efficient way of doing things, if storage is a concern and you want to make sure that you’re getting the absolute most out of the $5 bucks every month that you’re playing for PlayStation Plus, then this is the best way to do it (at least until streaming becomes a thing when PS4 goes adds teh cloudz).

So…what are you still doing here? Go amass a glorious PlayStation Plus game collection! Storage be damned!

Joel Taveras is one of the founding members of DualShockers. He hails from New York City where he lives with his wife and two sons. During his tenure with the site, he's held every position from news writer to community manager to editor in chief. Currently he manages the behind the scenes and day-to-day operations at the publication.